Still shining
by DiePi
Summary: Set in sometime in future but quite a bit before the TYL arc. It was still something so disturbingly unforgettable and profoundly repugnant, the difference between a baseball and a human. TYL!18TYL!80. A certain level of gore.


**Title**: Still shining  
**Author**: Kanon  
**Genre**: Romance/?Angst  
**Rating**: PG-15  
**Pairing**: TYL!18TYL!80? TYL!80TYL!18? Anyway, it's TYL!Hibari Kyoya and TYL!Yamamoto Takeshi.  
**Disclaimer**: Me owns no mafia, no rings, no money; nothing but the perversity of a fangirl.  
**Distribution**: Fanfiction and LJ  
**Summary**: Set in sometime in future but quite a bit before the TYL arc. It was still something so disturbingly unforgettable and profoundly repugnant, the difference between a baseball and a human.  
**Spoilers**: None but if you have not reached TYL arc, you will not understand the general background setting that brings about the fights as I have not bothered making anything clear in that aspect.  
**Warning**: Not extreme but a certain degree of gore. OOC Yamamoto? I find him even harder than Hibari in some ways (sweat)

**Author's Note**:

I had to stop in the middle of writing this piece and so I kinda lost what I was getting at. sweat Take your own pick whether this is 1880 or 8018. I'm still having a bit of trouble with Yamamoto so please let me know if you see any OOCness in him.

And most of all, I hope you enjoy and please review!

* * *

**Still shining by Kanon**

* * *

It was hard to tell who had a better deal of it, Yamamoto or Hibari. No, that was not quite true. Perhaps it was more correct to ask who was more susceptible to it. Yeah, that sounded about right; and it had a pretty clear answer too. Because Hibari certainly had years of _that_ feeling echoing along his arms and frankly, neither did he care much about it. On the other hand, it was still something so disturbingly unforgettable and profoundly repugnant for Yamamoto even if he had never backed down from it when required; and every time, he was reminded of the distinctive difference between a baseball and a human even now.

Sometimes, Yamamoto thought about how grateful he was that their youngest Guardian's horns were made so that the tips of them never in fact physically hit the opponent, the crackling ball of some absurd amount of electrical energy filling up the space in between; how grateful he was that the extreme Sun Guardian's maximum canon propelled the target away from the frightening fist the instant it made the contact so that all there was on the knuckles was the barest of warmth of another human being; how grateful he was that the belief in one's own illusion was what decided the victory for the only female Guardian; how grateful he was that the hot-tempered yet soft-hearted Thunder Guardian was a mid-long range specialist and never had to physically lay his delicate, piano-suited hand on his enemy; how grateful he was that his friend, his Boss, had found a way to expel his high-density flame away from those deceivingly small fists of hands, protected by the orange flames that enveloped them.

And quite a lot of times, he thought about how grateful he was that out of all people, it had been the apathetic Cloud Guardian who had witnessed the moment his katana had eerily smoothly slashed another human's flesh, the veins, and the insides for the first time.

There was no other weapon wielded by the Vongola Decimo's Guardians that better delivered the indescribable sensation of breaking through the skin and ripping down the stiff muscles than a steel katana and a pair of tonfas. Flamed fists were, at the end of the day, a surface of blunt roundedness, however powerful they might be, and Tsuna, even now, did not have the heart to strike the guaranteed killing blow on the heads of the assassins. Lambo was usually exempted from any mission that held possibility of brutal battles and Ryohei was often the trusted messenger acting on behalf of the tenth boss of Vongola, travelling via the most secure routes. Gokudera was seldom found missing from his place on the right hand side of his superior and while the splatter of crimson blood on the silver hair, specked with dust from explosions, was no longer a never-seen-before sight for any of the family, he was yet to feel the life leaving its shell directly on his skin. Illusions remained the first line of offence for Chrome and once Mukuro made anappearance, well, it was just another old story for the mafia criminal though his preferred method was a quick, clean stab; after all, the trident stood more imposing and proud than ever when it was dripping with blood from its skewered victim dangling on its end.

Nobody had known how it was going with the elusive Cloud Guardian though there were fair few speculation, all centred around just how heavy the scent of blood would be around the man; and Yamamoto had not expected to find it out the way he had.

-x-

_Yamamoto instantly stilled his movement the moment he felt the alien sensation travelling down his katana's blade and tingling his palm tightly grasping the hilt in a way that it instantly numbed the skin with its unexpectedness. Hastily he forced his arm to slack and stop the fatal arc his weapon had drawn but it was too late; his sensory had already elapsed into overdrive after the initial shock, multiplying the subtle changes in the resistance against the wet blade, and oh god, Yamamoto had never particularly wanted to know how the katana could move at about a double speed once it had parted open the taut muscles and entered the pathetically protected abdominal area, the slimy intestines no match against the razor-sharp force; until the blade stopped, not due to his effort, but by the creaking crash with the spine. _

_Sticky, warm, no, _hot_, red --and he swore it was as _red_ as the colour could possibly get-- fluid trickled down his face dripping with sticky, hot, red fluid. The now dead man had been in close proximity when Yamamoto had blindly swung his katana back, unaware of the stealthy presence from behind his back, because he was too caught up with surviving the rains and rains of attacks from his front, from his side, from _everywhere_. And he had turned around out of reflex; now, stunned with the strange, strange sensation freezing his fingers where they were, his face had received the full force of the gushing blood erupting from the severed aorta and there was nothing that Yamamoto could do but blink his wide olive eyes as he watched in a__daze, the man dropping onto the ground with a thud, every flicker of the eyelashes creating a temporary bridge for the blood --only now he acknowledged what it was belatedly-- to join the bigger puddle below. _

_Faintly, he might have heard some shouts and screams, swirling and pooling at his eardrums like a bee's buzz and never quite reaching his brain, but he could not get any part of his body to break out of the frozen stature. The sickening feeling of his katana --and the weapon was effectively his _hand_-- tearing through the live warmth of another human being relived itself over and over again, perhaps only in his mind, perhaps on his hands for real; it had been quicker than blinking an eye yet the sensation reverberated throughout him._

"_Yamamoto-dono!! Watch out!!"_

_Basil's ragged voice managed to make it to him through all the mayhem that enveloped them and Yamamoto, his jaw still hanging slack, twisted his stiff neck a little, the murky green eyes following the movement. A glint of metal above him, a swish of air, and-_

_-and another glint of steel, the ominously glistening tips of the sharp spikes protruding from a pair of tonfas._

"_Yamamoto Takeshi. Get out of the way if you are only going to be a hindrance or I'll bite you to death."_

"…_Hibari."­_

-x-

Sometimes, Yamamoto dreamt about that time; the second stage of the fight after the turnabout point by the appearance of the strongest Guardian had been one-sided enough to be called a massacre instead of a battle. Wherever Hibari's lithe frame showed up, it was followed by bloodcurdling screams and bone-crunching sounds, accompanied with that squelchy sound of something spongy getting ruthlessly smacked. Rivulets and streams of crimson filled the air as the tonfas bore their spikes at a perfect angle to gnaw out the carotid artery once a neck was caught --and they did their job _formidably_-- and the grapples dangling at the end of the usually hidden chains effortlessly disembowelled the unlucky enemies with the sheer force of the strikes.

And Yamamoto had remained standing in the middle of the battlefield, his unblinking eyes subconsciously following the Cloud Guardian, following every lash of the arms and every kick of the legs, following the droplets and gushes of the thick, damn red blood. He did not react to the chilling shrills from the enemies suddenly missing bits and pieces of their bodies, the surprisingly dull noises of skulls getting punctured and cracked, the gurgling sounds the dying men managed to produce during their last few seconds of their lives, clutching at their mutilated necks, and the bizarrely slowed frames of the guts caught in the grapples flying out through the air like some obscure births of alien beings in a third-rate sci-fi film.

It was, in fact, the sheer silence that had snapped him out of his stupor. An impassable silence, the stench of death clogging the air, the aroma of victory tingling his nose.

And in the middle of the strewn corpses, Hibari Kyoya had been standing like a conqueror that he was, his narrow charcoal eyes faintly smirking at the utter human demolition around him.

It had been one hell of a horrifying and breathtaking picture.

-x-

_Yamamoto startled abruptly when he realised that at some point of his stupefied state, he was now the new recipient of the cutting gaze. The violet-lit tonfas were still there, still in the hands that had smashed bones to pieces and uninhibitedly bitten anyone in way to death since even before they had first met, and Yamamoto watched in numbed befuddlement as Hibari suddenly approached him in silence. The man had, for all the _

_strength he possessed, never for once towered over him and breaking out into the usual grin that surfaced on its own accord like a string-pulled marionette, Yamamoto lowered his eyes to meet the dark ones. He did not realise it made him look like an awfully failed wax sculpture made by a kindergartner that possessed some badly twisted sense of art, and he did not realise that his hands, yet to uncurl from around the clammy hilt of his katana humming at the first taste of that tangy warmth, were shaking, making the blade rattle almost audibly. _

"_Yo, Hibari. I wasn't expecting to come across you here."_

_It might have been only his illusion --was Mukuro around as well?-- but he thought the fine eyebrows had knitted by a micrometer, the thin lips pursing, but in a moment that would not have been long enough to even blink an eye, he found himself defending against a bar of scarlet-dyed steel; red but no purple. _

"_Hibari!"_

"_Grip it tightly or you'll be bitten to death, herbivore."_

_And even before he could find the cold black irises, there was a threatening swoosh of air forced to split just at his ear and instinctively, Yamamoto brought around his katana --and he realised the blood had now thickly dribbled down onto his hands-- just in time before the spikes could give him some unwanted piercings on his cheek. _

_Yamamoto --and all the other Guardians, in fact-- knew that there was no point in trying to get a word through to__HIbari, let alone reason with him, in situations like these and with re-found reflexes and energy, the blade successfully greeted the tonfas in every knocking that grew faster and faster. _

_The spar, if put nicely in Yamamoto-way, lasted long enough for the past Discipline Committee members to have finished up clearing the remnants of the bloodshed at the hands of their leader, and it was when there was no one but him and the Cloud Guardian that Yamamoto, for the first time, switched from defence to attack; it was also then that all movements from Hibari abruptly stopped. Sucking in a sharp breath with widened eyes, Yamamoto saw the image of his first ever kill superimposing itself on his fellow Guardian who simply watched him stoically, almost languidly. With a curse so unbefitting him, his muscles nearly jumped in hasty twisting, the flawless arc interrupted for a nanosecond. It was enough for Hibari to smash the unforgiving tonfa hard into his gut, sending him flying out till he landed in a disgraceful sprawl. Yamamoto cringed when he realised it was smack in the middle of the particularly large pool of blood --the liquid was still so _warm_--but there was not a moment to waste in wincing as he detected Hibari launching at him again, his tonfas yet to gain the infamous violet flame. It was only when he turned his grip upside down to block the sideway attack that he saw something that might explain why; his own calming blue flame was nowhere to be seen. _

-x-

"Ah, Gokudera!"

Yamamoto laughed in all the joy despite the distasteful scowl on the Storm Guardian's matured face and slung his arm around the shoulders. It had been a long time since the half-Italian had stopped putting in extra effort to stop the friendly gestures; _he's too stupid to learn the lesson and I'm not stooping to the level of his idiocy_, Gokudera --the grown-up one-- would say when asked about the change.

"What, baseball nut?"

It had also been a long time since he had last held a baseball bat but the nostalgic name had not changed and Yamamoto knew it would not, so as usual, and much to Gokudera's annoyance, he easily shrugged it off.

"What's that in your hand?"

The irritation in the green eyes went up another notch at the question.

"I had shit enough luck to bump into Hibari on my way hereand he dumped his report on me."

"Oh, Hibari is back?"

Though Gokudera arched his eyebrow in slight perplexity at the swordsman's evident perk, he only nodded, half-growling. The subject of the Cloud Guardian was one of handful things that let the bomber's mind off just how obnoxious the once star baseball player was.

"Yeah. God know where he has been this time."

"Hahaha! I'm sure he's been doing something helpful. Well, I'm going to see Hibari then. See ya!"

The Storm Guardian's features morphed in a peculiar fashion as he watched the receding back of the Rain Guardian then belatedly, he remembered something and shouted.

"Oi, baseball nut! Hibari said he was going to sleep!!"

Gokudera cursed, switching between Italian and Japanese; he had a bad --no, good, it was a _good_ feeling, he insisted-- feeling that Yamamoto had not heard him.

-x-

_At some point, the sun had set and the world had grown dark. Exactly when, the two Guardians did not know but by the time Yamamoto was more or less back on his usual top condition, unrelentingly dodging Hibari's hits and his katana sneaking in the miniscule gaps in the Cloud Guardian's defence, there hung a thin slice of silver in the place of a scorching sphere. _

_There were small cuts and grazes on the ex-prefect's porcelain skin and the blood-soaked suit; all from the times that Hibari, for no apparent reason, decided to halt and let the blade scrape despite the shocked calls from the katana-wielder. Yamamoto also sported a fair number of swelling bruises though they were hidden under the crumpled suit. _

_And the Rain Guardian was experiencing adrenaline-rushing exhilaration like never before._

_Every collision with the ex-prefect's uncaring, brutal weapons, every harsh breathe he took in between ducking the swings, every instinctive step he took to let his katana dance freely without any reserve, he felt himself returning to his senses. And he thought that he was slowly coming to understand the aim of Hibari's seemingly improper --not that the guy ever cared much about _improperness_-- engagement in battle with another Guardian; it was a lesson of 'attack with no reserve if you want to survive', one that Yamamoto would have dismally failed after coming to a physical understanding of what Shigure Souen Ryuu was truly capable of. Perhaps the tag that his current opponent was Hibari was still there but right now, at this moment, he knew that his katana sliced the air at its top speed, his hands unwaveringly gripping the hilt and the muscles in his arms tensing and relaxing at just the right time to execute the flowing movements of his style to its full potential. _

_What a katana achieves is ultimately decided by its wielder; his dad had once said it and Yamamoto had never understood the words better than now. And now, he was trying to tame the newly discovered beast that was his katana and there was no better opponent than Hibari for it because against the Foundation leader, you simply could not hold anything back. It was a steep learning curve on how not to kill but not to die but then he had always been one to learn better in action than words. _

_On the other hand, Yamamoto could not deny that those small contacts with the resistance only felt from another _live_ human being --it had had him nearly drop his weapon on its first time; it was _Hibari Kyoya_'s skin cut open under the blade-- were steadily steeling himself against the sensation and his gut no longer secretly faltered at the sight of the blood-stained blade. He doubted he would ever grow used to the feeling that he no longer acknowledged as alien but at least, he should not freeze in the middle of a fight. There was no way to tell whether that was Hibari's true intention or not, but either way, he was immensely glad that it had not been others, like Gokudera or, even worse, Tsuna, who had witnessed the numbing moment. _

_He was not sure if the sorry, pitiful stare of the bright green eyes or the soft words of consolation would have slapped him awake as well as Hibari's abrupt attacks has. _

_With a grunt, Yamamoto only just barely stopped the tonfa digging into his side but his battered arms screeched in protest against the sheer force required for the feat and with a rueful smile, he watched as his katana flipping out of his slackened grasp and spinning in the air before stabbing the soggy ground. The olive and black eyes watched the blade quivering eerily before Hibari's unreadable gaze shifted to the defenceless Rain Guardian, then the low, toneless voice cut through the night's silence. _

"_Is that all you got, Yamamoto Takeshi?"_

_The swordsman merely scratched the back of his head --the habit had not changed over the past years-- with a naive laughter. _

"_You don't look too good yourself, you know."_

_And he knew that had Gokudera and Tsuna been here, they would have horribly blanched at his reply in fear that he had provoked the fearsome man again, but the Cloud Guardian remained quite still, the dark eyes scanning the tall swordsman. Then the tonfas were returned to a purple box and the other hand came up to hover about the mouth dropping open in a yawn. _

"_I'm sleepy. I'm going back."_

_Yamamoto grinned but instead of following Hibari, he took a dive onto the ground on his back, his limbs spread eagle. The Foundation leader did not glance back at the dull thud. Yamamoto had not expected him to. Instead, he gave out an innocent chuckle to the star-dusted sky above him. _

"_Let's do this again sometime, Hibari!!"_

_Yamamoto almost chocked on his wheezy breathing in surprise the next moment when the detached voice unexpectedly flitted in at a distance. _

"_I'll bite a herbivore like you to death at anytime, Yamamoto Takeshi."_

-x-

"Hibari!"

With the booming call bouncing off the oriental walls, Yamamoto had whipped the shoji door open but instead of striding in, he had to swiftly crouch down to avoid the unrestrained swipe of a tonfa from a black yukata-clad Hibari whose murderous aura was overflowing the spacious room.

"I heard your footsteps even before you overstepped the no-trespass line. And you have interrupted my sleep. I'll bite you to death, Yamamoto Takeshi."

"Hahahaha! Well, let's move out to your garden, 'kay?"

Kusakabe had come out of the adjacent room when he had detected the distinctive approach of the Rain Guardian. He could not pinpoint what it was but there was something unique enough in the presence of Yamamoto Takeshi that most of the family could instinctively sense in the merry-go-luck swordsman's awake, like the striking force of the invincible Shigure Souen Ryuu tamely doused by the shining brightness that was impossible to come across in the harsh world of mafia if one was not of Vongola.

The second-in-command of the Foundation followed the two Guardians already clashing their weapons in the polished Japanese-style garden with his eyes somewhat wearily but did not make any effort to pull them apart.

"What did you come here for, herbivore?"

"I heard from Gokudera that you came back!" Shouted Yamamoto over the shrills of steels, turning his wrist so the tonfa against the blade slid down the shiny surface, leaving Hibari's right side open. The Cloud Guardian easily evaded the attempted attack and with the agility of a skylark, instantly switched to offence. "That does not answer my question and you are crowding my place."

Kusakabe watched the fierce battle of a katana and tonfas that were at times not unlike a well-choreographed dance, neither blue nor violet flames alight --it was like an unspoken tradition of some sort between the two--, then turned to return to his work. He had wisely decided not to point out that if Hibari had truly not wanted the Rain Guardian to intrude on his private section of the underground Vongola hideout without his permission, all he had to do was simply remove the name of Yamamoto Takeshi from the allowed entrants list on the system.

Though he doubted his leader would ever let it happen. He had checked the admin log when he saw the new name flashing in green along with Hibari's and his.

Next to the swordsman's name was the date and time of the latest change made in the system along with the authoriser; Hibari Kyoya.


End file.
